


heaven or hell or somewhere in between

by hi_raeth



Series: a soft epilogue [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Safe to Read if You're Triggered by Pregnancy, and Ben, and ben's laugh, ben is also very soft for rey so it all evens out, by using the dyad of course, in which the author halfheartedly tries to explain ben's miraculous resurrection, post-TRoS fix-it, rey is so soft for ben's smile
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:34:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25786702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hi_raeth/pseuds/hi_raeth
Summary: After a morning at Mos Eisley, Rey and Ben talk about last names, the world between worlds, and their future.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: a soft epilogue [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1607638
Comments: 28
Kudos: 103





	heaven or hell or somewhere in between

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from The Civil Wars' _C'est la mort_ , in keeping with the rest of this series.

Most days, they pretend to be okay.

Sometimes, Rey feels as if their whole lives have been preparing them to do this, to gingerly dance around the fact that he came back from the dead and she doesn’t know what comes next and the entire galaxy is changing around them.

And they’re good at it, at pretending everything is normal – most days.

Today starts out as one of those days, with a routine trip to the market in Mos Eisley for the week’s necessities. Even as they head back to the Lars homestead, with Ben’s arms wrapped around her middle as their too-small speeder carries them home at a pace that’s more leisurely than speedy, the day seems like any other.

“So it’s Rey Kanata now, is it?” Ben teases, lips soft and warm against the exposed skin of her neck as he echoes the name she’d off-handedly muttered to a nosy merchant. For a lawless desert planet, the people of Tatooine are disconcertingly fixated upon last names and those who don’t have one; Rey had learned early on, before she’d even reached Luke’s childhood home, that the easiest thing to do is just give the strangers something to appease their curiosity and move on.

She shrugs, the movement contained by the way Ben is wrapped around her so that he doesn’t fall off the back of the speeder. “Fewer questions, that way. I’ve also been Rey Skywalker, Organa, Tico, Connix…”

“But never Solo?” It’s asked lightly, with a smile in his voice, but Ben can’t quite hide his genuine curiosity… just as she can’t quite hide the way her heart skips a beat at the implication of her taking that particular last name.

 _Slow,_ Rey reminds herself. They’re taking things slow, now that they have the time to. And in the interest of keeping things slow, that is a conversation for another day.

“Chewie said literally any other name in the galaxy would be safer,” she tells Ben, because it’s the easiest answer to give and it’s partially the truth, anyway. They don’t have to dwell on the fact that the name would have been too painful to claim even if it hadn’t been associated with the galaxy’s most notorious smuggler.

Ben seems to be in agreement, accepting the answer with a laugh. “Of course he did. You’d have more bounty hunters on your trail than you’d know what to– Rey?”

The speeder slows to a stop, all so she can wriggle in his arms to turn around and face him, to trace one shaking hand over the indentations in his cheek.

 _Dimples_ , he’d explained the first time she’d touched them like this.

No one had ever smiled widely enough to show dimples on Jakku.

“Sweetheart, is everything okay?”

His dimples fade as the furrow between his brows deepen, and the moment passes. Rey keeps one hand curved around his cheek while the other slides to the back of his neck, gives him a reassuring smile as her thumb caresses an invisible scar. “I just… I like it when you laugh.”

And so he does, an amused little puff of air as he leans down to press their foreheads together. “Yeah, me too.”

She forgets, sometimes, that all of this is just as new to him as it is to her. Waking up with a smile, laughing just because, feeling _happy_ more often than not… sometimes Ben muses that perhaps death really does change a person.

 _Or maybe it’s love_ , he always adds just a moment later.

Rey likes to think it’s the latter, refuses to even entertain the thought that something good could have come from his death. Because– “I almost never got to see this,” she murmurs, lips close enough to brush Ben’s as she speaks. “You, laughing and smiling and _happy_ … You’re so beautiful like this, Ben, and I almost never–”

He draws her away from that dark path by silencing her with a kiss; it’s a decent attempt at distraction and comfort, one that works more often than not, but today seems to be one of those rare days when even the press of Ben’s lips against hers and the weight of his arms around her can’t fully chase away the shadows in her mind. She knows Ben can sense those persistent thoughts in her mind by the way he holds her tighter, kisses her harder, but eventually he gives up and they part for breath.

“Rey?” he asks, voice little more than a whisper as he searches her eyes for some sort of sign that will tell him how to make things better, how to make this all go away.

They’ve tried that, tried outrunning their ghosts and chasing away their nightmares. Maybe… maybe it’s time to confront them instead. But not now, not with the twin suns climbing ever higher in the sky as noon approaches.

She shakes her head, gives him one last smiling kiss before turning back around to the controls. “Let’s talk about it at home.”

Ben secures his hold on her once more and presses his lips to her forehead, murmurs an agreement into her hair. The remainder of the ride is spent in silence, but behind her she can sense Ben gathering his thoughts and reexamining his memories, preparing himself for a long overdue conversation.

 _I’m sorry_ , she sighs as his turmoil bleeds into the bond, a complex mess of emotions surrounding his time away from her. They should just put this behind them, she should just move on and not make him relive his own death and afterlife, however brief it had been, but…

 _Closure,_ Ben tells her, his presence warm and comforting and gentle in the back of her mind. _We need closure before we can move on, I always knew that._

“I want to do this,” he says out loud, giving her waist a light squeeze as the moisture farm comes into view. “I’m ready to let it all out and leave it behind. I just…”

He doesn’t put it into words, neither aloud nor privately, but she understands his request all the same: to hold her while he relives that journey without her, to ground himself in the tangible, undeniable touch and weight and scent of her while his mind drifts worlds away.

So as soon as they enter the homestead, Rey opts to leave their purchases scattered around the kitchen and leads him to their bed in lieu of putting everything away and preparing lunch.

It’s cramped in their little room, especially after the addition of a mattress Ben had insisted on after his first and only night sharing her bedroll; Rey had spent that entire trip to the market teasing him for his princely roots until he stopped her with a kiss in full view of all the nosey traders and smugglers.

The knowing looks they’d been on the receiving end while they strapped their purchase to the speeder is still fresh in her memory, and it colors the bond with a lingering tinge of mirth even as she tugs Ben to lie down on his side next to her. He comes willingly, draping one heavy, warm arm around her waist while the other pillows his cheek.

Arranged like this, Rey imagines they must look like matching puzzle pieces from a bird’s-eye view, two halves of a whole curved around each other.

“We are, you know,” Ben tells her quietly, catching her stray thought. “Two halves of a whole, I mean.”

She’s puzzled for a brief instance, but the nervousness in his voice, the haunted look in his eyes… He’s going somewhere with this, and she’s willing to take the long, winding road with him. “The dyad,” she murmurs in recollection, digging up memories she’d painstakingly sealed away after… after Exegol. In the brief moments she’d had to process the revelation about their connection Rey had embraced all of it, allowed it to sink into her very soul and relished in the _rightness_ of it all. Of course she and Ben are undeniably linked, of course they’re cut from the same cloth, of course they’re two that are one.

But after, there were days when she wished she’d never heard about the dyad, wished she hadn’t come so close to finally finding belonging only to have it so cruelly ripped away.

Ben pulls her closer and holds her tighter, and together they anchor each other until the storm of pain and loss and regret passes them by. He waits until the memory of his cold lips are chased away by the warmth of his touch before speaking again, and as he does memories of places she’s never been to and people she’s never seen find their way into her mind.

“Palpatine wasn’t lying when he said the dyad is a power like life itself.” His words are rushed, as if he means to move them past that particular memory as quickly as possible; Rey doesn’t blame him for it. “It was designed that way, so that the two that are one would never be torn apart, even if one of them were to be fatally wounded. The Force can be cruel, but to tear a dyad apart, to keep two halves of a whole permanently separated – even it could not conceive of something that… that unnatural.”

It’s just a flash, the memory of her cold body in his arms, of her soul gone somewhere he cannot follow, but Ben falters all the same, loses his voice and inhales with a shudder while Rey runs a comforting touch up and down the length of his arm until the moment passes.

They’re haunted by the ghosts of each other even now, even while they’re alive and whole and inextricably tangled together the way they were always meant to be, the way they always will be.

Maybe they’ll always be haunted, but Rey knows they’ll get through it together somehow.

When Ben’s breathing finally returns to normal and she senses him trying to pick up the frayed pieces of his thoughts, Rey laces their fingers together and helps him. “He said something about a life force, in our bond. Is that how it works?”

Ben gives her hand a grateful squeeze as he nods. “You can’t… fully deplete it, but what you did for me on Kef Bir and what I did for you after and–” he barrels on, determined to outrun the memory from earlier, “–and then with Palpatine using it for himself, we came pretty close to it.”

Rey chases away a memory of her own, choosing to focus instead on the days and weeks that had come after, on how the emptiness in her heart felt like a wound that wouldn’t close, wouldn’t heal, wouldn’t move on, and realizes now that moving on was literally never a possibility, not even if she had somehow found the resolve to do so.

“So all along, the bond was–”

She makes no attempt to hide the awe in her voice, not when it’s so clearly reflected in Ben’s eyes. “Healing. Recharging, they called it.”

And finally, they’ve arrived at the heart of it all: where he went while their bond was healing, what he did and who he met.

“Who, Ben?” She’s careful with her tone, careful not to push and prod until he’s absolutely ready, but the glimpses bleeding through the bond only add to her need to know. Ben already knows everything she went through while they were apart, for better or for worse, but the time he spent out of her reach, the time he spent _dead_ remains as much of a mystery to her now as it was the day he walked back into her life on Ahch-To.

“People I thought I’d never see again,” he tells her, voice faint with wonder and something more complex. “People I thought I’d never see at all. People I grew up believing were just legends.” Ben shakes his head and takes a moment to himself before he invites her into his memories of a world beyond time and space, a world–

“They call it the world between worlds.”

It’s vaguely familiar, no doubt from a page in one of the sacred texts, but Rey doesn’t remember anything beyond a passing mention or two. For it to be _between_ , though, can only mean– “You weren’t dead?” she murmurs, more to herself than Ben. It doesn’t make sense, all of that _pain_ doesn’t make sense unless he was gone from her in the most terrible way possible, but… she did wonder, didn’t she? Why he faded away but never appeared to her again, why he was never with Luke and Leia, why… why some part of her refused to accept the truth?

Ben brings her back to the moment with a squeeze of her hand. “I was… very close to it,” he says, words rushing out of him on an exhale. “For the longest time, I thought I was. And so did everyone else, I think. My mother, Luke, all these Jedi Masters – no one knew what was happening to me, why I seemed _stuck_. It’s just like Palpatine said: no one has seen a dyad in hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. But the longer I was there, the more people I found, the more I learned about us… until one day I found myself hoping even against my better judgment.”

He’d said so himself, that miraculous day on Ahch-To: _“I was so scared, too scared to hope…”_ And in that moment she’d felt her heart break for the both of them even as her soul started knitting itself back together again, two broken people who’d grown to fear even hope itself.

But that’s all in the past, and now… “And now here you are,” Rey whispers into the heavy silence that surrounds them, a reassurance meant for herself just as much as it is for him. Their past is a dark abyss, one that will always be just two steps behind them, always ready to consume them if they make the mistake of turning back to look at it, but Rey won’t let it.

It’s time to focus on the future now.

 _What future,_ she hears Ben wonder before he can rein in his thoughts, his doubts… his fears.

Rey lets go of his hand to curve her fingers around his jaw instead, holding him steady even as he closes his eyes in an attempt to hide from her. “Don’t you…” It’s ridiculous, she knows it is before she’s even said it out loud, but for just a moment her faith in them falters under the weight of Ben’s sudden despair. “Don’t you _want_ a future together?”

Ben’s eyes snap open immediately. “ _Rey,_ ” he breathes, hands wrapping around her waist to pull her closer, so close she’s practically on top of him. “Sweetheart, there is nothing in this galaxy – in this _universe –_ than I want more than a future with you, a _life_ with you.”

It would be so easy to just dip down a bit, to kiss him and taste the sweetness of his words for herself. But–

“But?” she prompts out loud.

“It’s just…” Ben sighs and closes his eyes for a moment, as if that’s enough to hide the doubts swirling around in his mind from her. She gives the bond a poke as if to remind him of the fact, and Ben finally gives in. “I want a future with you, Rey, but… what kind of future can there be for a man like me? What kind of future can _you_ have with a dead man hated by not only the galaxy, but all of your friends?”

Rey drops her heart on his chest, listens to his soothing heartbeat as his words ring in her ears. Sometimes, sometimes she wonders if maybe the reason they’ve both been putting off leaving Tatooine isn’t because they don’t know where to go next, but because they’re scared to leave this desert planet turned sanctuary, this remote little dustball where consequences and judgment can’t find them.

But they didn’t win a war, didn’t both come back from the dead, just to waste their lives hiding with ghosts. Rey raises her head and presses a hard kiss to Ben’s mouth before he can speak again, before he can let his doubts tighten their hold on his heart.

“If death couldn’t keep us apart,” she whispers between kisses, while Ben struggles to catch his breath and silence his fears, “then _nothing_ can. I swear, Ben – we’ll have a future together, no matter what.”

The way he looks at her sometimes, like she’s the first hint of sunrise after a long night… It makes her heart feel too big for her body, for her soul, for the entire _galaxy_ that exists between the two of them.

“Okay?” she asks, sounding a little breathless herself.

Ben looks at her for the longest time while insecurities and nightmares rage in his mind until–

Peace washes over the bond as his mind goes blessedly quiet, and he smiles at her the way she loves best, all crinkled eyes and crooked teeth and deep dimples. “Okay,” he says, voice shaking with joy and relief as he reaches to pull her back down, “okay, sweetheart.”

Rey goes willingly, figuring that they can afford one last day like this before they finally figure out the rest of their lives.

**Author's Note:**

> *shows up six months late with Starbucks in hand*
> 
> This took way too long to write and is also way too long compared to the other ficlets, but at long last it's done!! Honestly I don't even know what this is anymore, but I've been working on it for too long to keep tinkering so out into the world it goes. A little heavy on the hurt/comfort this time, but I promise the next (and final) piece will see them finally getting away from Tatooine and moving on with their lives.
> 
> A huge thank-you to the handful of people who stuck around despite the hiatus, and I hope you enjoyed this. As always, please feel free to leave a comment or [say hi on Twitter](https://twitter.com/hiraeth_writes).


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